Are you having trouble finding the right influencers who match your ideal customer profile (ICP)?
Or maybe its how to vet them and manage a campaign that gets results?
Or you wonder what metrics and tools to use?
No matter what all of these factors have something in common:
It is about the mechanics of influencer marketing and putting the pieces together to make it work successfully.
Yes, you’d like to think influencer marketing can be easily automated but the reality is it can’t.
Nor should it.
Many mid-sized companies, both consumer and B2B persistently struggle with these problems.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
First, most influencer platforms are simply massive lists of influencers scraped from the social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.
Therefore, when you search for influencers, you get served up a mishmash of Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes mixed together with social media stars.
Sifting through it is time consuming and frustrating.
The other problem is that artificial intelligence (AI) used by many of these platforms is still imperfect and generically designed.
They try to service all types of clients.
Moreover, many do a poor job of qualitative analysis and can’t assess influencers based on the ideals and values held by your company.
That requires the human touch.
Now let’s dive into what you can do about it.
One Solution is to Educate Your Marketing Team
An educated marketing team is a smart marketing team.
Invest in training and resources so your people know and understand how influencer marketing works, what it can do and not do.
You and your team should understand it’s not a cure-all strategy nor is it intended to make up for a lack of good marketing.
In fact, it works best in tandem with your content, social media, and email marketing initiatives.
For example:
Many companies simply pay for access to an influencer platform without training their people how to work with the influencers once they find them.
It’s not just a matter of having a list of influencers, but how to set up a campaign strategy, enroll the influencers and then execute it.
Moreover, when it comes to identifying influencers who are a good match for your brand, a lot depends on the “human touch” as I like to call it.
Your marketing team needs to know and understand what qualities to look for in an influencer and what to avoid.
So, hiring a consultant like me to train your team is a solution.
Another Solution is to Bring Influencer Marketing Expertise In House
Hiring someone is a direct way to bring knowledge and expertise in-house.
Your expert can educate the rest of your team about how to work with influencers, which tools to use, and metrics to use.
You could also hire an influencer and bring them onto your team.
The only drawback is that you must take on the headcount and all that entails and not every company is able to do that.
Here’s an example of how I’ve seen this work:
A few years back, I was running the influencer program for a major tech company.
We noticed that competitors started hiring our influencers, bringing them on as employees.
By doing so, they brought the expertise in-house while simultaneously cutting them out of our network.
It was a smart strategy.
Finally, Hire an Experienced Influencer Marketing Agency
Hiring a quality influencer marketing agency is the best of both worlds.
When you hire a qualified agency, you get an instant bench of talent … their know-how, experience, and creativity are all at your disposal.
They become an extension of your in-house marketing team.
They can help you build a list of high-quality influencers, bring a creative edge to your campaigns while training your team in the process.
The agency can also leverage the experience they have with other clients and apply it to you.
I’ve seen agencies leverage ideas they used for clients in completely different industries and leverage those ideas to create a new campaign that’s unique and creative while using the lessons learned.
An influencer agency that does this well is Open Influence.
I’ve been watching their work and communicating with their team for a long time now. I’m impressed with their work and their client roster.
I also like their philosophy.
The team at Open Influence finds, vets, and recruits influencers into campaigns for their clients using a number of advanced tools and algorithms.
They have their own proprietary technology, but they don’t stop there.
Remember that “human touch” I referred to before? Open Influence believes in this too.
The influencers must “make sense” on several levels including relevance and context. Sometimes, Open Influence will even conduct background checks on influencers in an effort to ensure that their clients don’t get burned.
Their philosophy is to treat every client as they would their own brand.
For these reasons, hiring an agency like Open Influence is a practical option and you should consider it.
Wrapping Up
Many companies want to use influencer marketing but don’t know how to begin.
They continue to struggle.
Given that there are some real and available options to choose from, which do you believe is best for your company?
This post is sponsored by Open Influence, a global influencer marketing pioneer and full-service agency with offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Milan, London, and Hong Kong.
